Can WordPress Fix Poor Web Design?

This tutorial explains some of the issues and problems caused by having a poorly-designed website and how WordPress can help fix poor web design.

WordPressAre you losing business because of a poorly-constructed website? Regardless of how great the quality of your products may be, a poorly-constructed website can end up costing you potential new customers and valuable business opportunities.

In a world where attractive design matters, your website’s design can play a significant part in your business success. Your website is probably the first thing that your visitors see and this can influence their decision to do business with you.

People are now turning more than ever to the internet to find products and services. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we still fire up our laptop and go browse someone’s web site before making our next move.

Now, try to see things from your customer’s point of view. How does your website appear to others? Does your site invite people to draw closer and explore things further, or does it make people confused and unsure about what to do next?

What web visitors see “above the fold” (i.e. what you first see on your screen) is just the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other factors than can affect your web visitors’ experience and their purchasing decisions.

Can WordPress Fix A Poorly-Constructed Website?

Here are just some key design problems that can affect your web site’s results:

Web Design Problems

Common web design issues that can influence a user’s perception about your website include some following:

  • Color – Bad color combinations can impact on your results. This also applies to the use of text and background color. There are methods that can help you choose web colors correctly and even safe web color tools you can use to make sure that the color schemes you decide on will display consistently across different mediums. If in doubt, seek the services of a web design professional.
  • Design Elements – Web pages that contain aesthetically unappealing, outdated or just plain old hard to read fonts can result in visitors quickly losing interest in off your site. Visitors can also be affected by inconsistent graphic elements and overpowering use of design elements.
  • Layout – The way you structure your pages can have a significant impact in the way users navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigational menus, links, and other objects.
  • Responsiveness – Since online information is now accessed through various devices with different-sized screens and browsers, it’s important that the design of your website be fully responsive. If your web pages do not resize automatically to work on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you may lose business opportunities.

Functionality Issues

Typical website functionality issues may include:

  • Subpar functionality – A huge turn-off for users is arriving on a site where some links don’t work, videos don’t play and images are missing. Persistent errors are no longer acceptable in a website, especially if you are trying to come across as a professional. Your website reflects your business. It’s vitally important therefore, to make sure that all your links, videos, and images remain up and running all the time. In some cases, these problems are related to factors such as your web hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to make sure that remain proactive and that you attend to problems immediately.
  • Feature limitations – If your web site provides visitors certain functionality, then make sure that these functionalities are not limited. For example, if you plan to sell products online, make sure that you provide visitors with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily select and add items to a shopping cart, apply discounts, pay using a credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts, and confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

Normally, where your business suffers most noticeably because of a poorly-built website is in the realm of the “user experience”.

A bad user experience can leave a bad taste in people’s mouths and lead to sharing their disappointment across social media, user forums, review sites, comments, etc., bringing you unwanted negative attention.

Common issues that can lead to a poor user experience include the following:

  • User-Friendly – Your website must be easy to use and effortless to navigate. Your service information should be easy to find. Your potential buyers want user-friendly features and they want to find what they are looking for quickly and without disappointment. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable content to your site (e.g. PDF reports), make sure that users are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
  • Organized – If your web site isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only prospective buyers but existing clients too. Features like descriptive URLs, product and service categories and sections where topic-related content can be easily found provides visitors with a good user experience.
  • Compelling Features – Users stick around on websites that are user friendly, well organized, and that provide them with eye-catching options. This means aiming for a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling web copy that engages your website users. For example, draw attention to links which lead to your product pages with great images with well-written descriptions. This is effective and will help improve not only the user experience on your website, but also improve your sales and conversions.
  • Interactive Site – Another aspect that helps to improve user experience on your website is to provide interactive features that engage users, such as features that let them\visitors leave comments, share, like, download and recommend your content, interact with your support staff via a responsive help desk, support forum, live chat, schedule appointments, make reservations, etc … You also want users to browse quickly around your site and access your data without waiting around for pages to load, so having your site optimized for page loading speed is important.
  • Trustworthy Site – One of the most important and often most ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to make sure that users feel comfortable interacting with you online. To reassure your prospective clients that you are credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure to add legal pages such as a business contact page, privacy policy, terms of usage, security information, earnings disclaimers, etc.

Website design issues

(Site design problems)

As the above shows, there are many areas that can contribute to a poor user experience and negatively impact your business success online. If your web site is poorly built, you run the serious risk of not only losing potential customers but also some of current customers as well.

Now … what if you have arrived on our website because you have an existing site with design issues that you feel are affecting your business?

First, keep in mind that getting issues corrected on an existing site can take some time and can also be somewhat costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you have, especially if the work requires a lot of web coding.

If you are currently researching the process of getting a new website developed or upgrading an existing site, then we suggest that you seriously consider using the WordPress web site management platform.

WordPress can help improve your website results!

(WordPress can improve your website results!)

We plan to publish more information about the benefits and advantages of the WordPress web site publishing platform on this site, but here are just a few things to keep in mind about why you should consider WordPress:

WP Themes – Unique Web Design Features

WordPress themes are unique web site design template systems that enable you to quickly customize the look and feel of your website in minutes.

There are thousands of great-looking themes for WordPress available that you can install on your website. Many themes are either free of charge, or they can be bought for a relatively small price, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.

WP Themes

(WP Themes)

Most themes are responsive and provide site owners with flexible and customizable options for changing design settings on your site like the color, template elements like menus, headers, footers, page layouts and more. This is just part of what makes WordPress such a great tool for helping you create a design for your website that ultimately helps your business.

Learn about WP themes here:

WordPress Plugins – Modular Scalability

Another great reason to build your site using the WordPress CMS is that WordPress provides users with modular functionality through add-on applications called “plugins.”

Plugins, like WP themes, integrate with your site to provide you with virtually unlimited extra features.

Earlier in this post we discussed areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly designed website could cost you money.

Plugins can help you overcome these issues and limitations quite easily. If there is a functionality that you want to add to your site, just install a plugin that will help you get what you need done.

Want a plugin that will notify you about any issues with your site like hyperlinks not working, audios not playing, pictures that are missing or even alert you if your entire website is down? No problems … there are WP plugins that can help you fix that, or notify you about problems so you can correct these immediately!

Want a plugin that will let you turn your website into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce business solution? Again, no problem! There are several inexpensive and easy-to-use WordPress plugins that will help you sell products online and provide your users with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily select and add products to a cart, enter discounts, order using credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts and confirmations, etc.

And just like WordPress themes, there are tens of thousands of fantastic WP plugins that can be easily downloaded free of charge, or can be bought relatively inexpensively, once again, saving you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of web development.

WordPress Plugins

(WordPress Plugins)

You can learn more about plugins here:

WordPress – An Interactive Web User Experience

In addition to being able to correct issues caused by a poorly-built website, WordPress can also help you provide your website users with a great user experience.

WordPress provides beautiful and exciting themes that cover all types of uses and applications and feature-rich plugins that allow customers to connect, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress website, WP themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a very rich and engaging user experience that will keep people coming back again and again.

WP tips

As we’ve previously stated, consumers will do extensive research online before they make a purchasing decision. If your website isn’t designed to provide your visitors with a rich and engaging user experience, consumers will simply move on to another business that does offer them a better website.

Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of issues that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you get better results online. To learn more about the benefits of using WordPress for a business web site please see other posts we have published on this site.

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"These tutorials have so much information and are easy to understand. If you use WordPress or plan to in the future these will help you with everything you need to know." - Valisa (Mesa, Arizona)

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